EYE OF THE BEHOLDER?

The question was raised on a C. S. Lewis listerv I belong to, “What is beauty?” One answer, from Lewis scholar Jim Prothero, was that beauty is “holiness made visible.” Another correspondent questioned the adequacy of that formula: a Prostitute may be beautiful but is hardly holy; Jesus’ mangled body on the cross was holy but hardly beautiful. How do we sort through all this complexity? It would be impossible to attempt an answer in a Blogpost that anyone would be willing to plough through. But I will attempt to steer my way between the Scylla of adequacy and the Charybdis of silence by offering a few random thoughts, inadequate (this I know) as they are tantalizing (this I hope).

Truth is the reflection of God’s mind, Goodness of His character, and Beauty of His glory, as they are found in the world He has made. Thus I try to summarize the matter in my longish scholarly essay on the topic, “A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C. S. Lewis on Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.” Because the world is cursed and our minds fallen, all three can be mistaken. But it hardly follows from this either that they are not real or that we are utterly incapable of recognizing them truly. In the case of Beauty, our minds can be, as I put it in one of my poems, “abused / By surface prettiness the eye can see” (Stars Through the Clouds, p. 353). Even the surface prettiness partakes of some faint hint of the real thing, however twisted. For, as Augustine teaches us, Evil is always a parasite on the Good. But true Beauty in its deepest form must be consistent with Truth and Goodness. The surface prettiness of the Prostitute is thus a perversion of Beauty, related to it by the real presence of good form and proportion, but not partaking of the fullness. And the surface ugliness of the Crucifixion hides the beauty of God’s holiness from those who do not penetrate deeper to see the meaning of His love. Instead of that they see only “cosmic child abuse.” Thus they miss the Beauty of Christ’s sacrifice precisely by missing also its Goodness and its Truth.

Prothero wants us to pursue “something higher and more beautiful than beauty, which, like joy, is not an end (a frequent mistake made in our culture) but a sign of higher things.” Yes; I see what he means. I think I agree, though I would not say it quite like that. I would put it this way: We only see Beauty in a partial and distorted way unless we see it as related to Truth and Goodness and see their unity as abiding in God. The Prostitute’s beauty is not unreal but it is partial and distorted; physical only. Because Beauty in its fullness is related to Truth and Goodness, it cannot be seen with the eye alone, but only with the mind—and only fully by a mind renewed and enlightened by grace. The Prostitute still has the part that the eye can see—but only that. And the mind enlightened by grace can see the deeper Beauty in something like the Crucifixion where the eye’s part is missing.

So Prothero’s formula, “Beauty is visible Holiness,” is I think true in an ultimate sense. We could say that Truth is holiness made intelligible and Goodness is holiness made practical, to make the Triad complete. ” Beauty is visible holiness then is true”; but it is not a truth that we can hope to see on first inspection, and never when the inspection is made by the eye alone. I don’t ever expect to see Mother Teresa’s face gracing the cover of Cosmo; but I’ll bet she was very beautiful to the poor of Calcutta, and I’ll bet they saw that beauty even in the specific features of her face: the compassion in her eyes, the love in her smile.

Inadequate? Surely. Tantalizing? We shall see. You can alwaysl ask for the essay. Write to me at dtw@tfc.edu and ask for my full essay on the topic, “A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C. S. Lewis on Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.”